Last year I wrote about adopting Writefreely as the blogging platform for my website. At the time, I was also trying to expand my presence on the Fediverse, so it made sense to try Writefreely, which natively supports the ActivityPub protocol.
Besides that, it looks great! You get a simple and clean website out of the box, without having to fiddle with CSS files. I’ve always appreciated the minimalist look of a default Writefreely website, and it’s definitely one of the reasons that convinced me to give it a try in the first place.
Even though I’m moving away from it, Writefreely (and its hosted, paid version, Write.as) remains a great tool. You get a blank canvas, and all you have to do is, well… write. No distractions, no page layouts (though you can customise the CSS), no complicated choices. For people who just want to write, it’s an excellent platform.
That said, there are some downsides to Writefreely, at least for me.
First and foremost, I felt I never had full control of my data. Sure, everything is hosted on my server, but the fact that the articles are stored in a database (rather than, say, plain markdown files) is not exactly ideal. Backups require extra care, exporting posts to Markdown is awkward, and you lose the immediacy and simplicity of just files and directories.
The second reason I’m moving away from Writefreely is that I want to go even more minimal. I’ve been fascinated by simple, classless css websites for a long time, and I want to build my website myself, without relying on external tools as much as I can.
So, in the current iteration of this website, I just have a collection of markdown files and a simple shell script which converts them using lowdown. I created a minimal CSS style sheet, inspired in part by the bestmotherfuckingwebsite, and that’s pretty much it. Simplicity at its best!